Hollywood’s great survivor

Being
John Travolta
seems to involve a fair degree of weirdness, the kind that makes you wonder why he would bother.

After all, as he notes, there probably won’t be another career like his given the way the business has changed. He’s had five career resurrections by his own count – including perhaps the most celebrated in Hollywood history, after
Quentin Tarantino
stared down Harvey Weinstein to cast a has-been, whose most recent roles had included Look Who’s Talking 3, in Pulp Fiction, the 1994 movie that changed film history.

As he enters the fifth decade of an illustrious career, Travolta has also found a whole new purpose: finally “getting to play with the sort of people I want to play with, like [
Robert] De Niro
and
Al Pacino
and Benicio Del Toro."

After the three-year hiatus following the January 2009 death of his son Jett, Travolta has two films due out in the coming year and “more A scripts than I would want to do", he says.

Travolta with Emma Thompson in Primary Colors.
AFR

Just the moment, you might think, to kick back and enjoy the – very sweet – fruits of his labour. But no, there he was in full pilot drag and even fuller make-up last Monday, braving the unforgiving light of a Chilean morning to greet passengers on
Qantas
’s inaugural flight to Santiago with a broad smile and outstretched hand, like some superannuated barrel girl.

“Welcome to Chile," he beamed, wheeling around almost animatronically to collect the next punter, for all the world as if one of those Flight Centre dummies had come to life.

Nor was that the end of Travolta’s duties. A few hours later, he fronted a packed Qantas press conference as meekly as a lamb, shrugging off the inevitable question about gossip mag speculation on his sexuality with a good-humoured “non comprende", then polishing off a series of Spanish-language interviews.

By the time he gets to the Weekend Financial Review – still in the mortician’s make-up, hair close-cropped and shoe-polish black – it’s late afternoon and he’s been at it since morning. Nonetheless, an agreed 20 minutes stretches into 40, then closer to an hour.

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You wonder what’s in it for him, especially after 10 years and given that Qantas has always maintained it pays the star only a nominal sum for his ambassadorial role. Over that decade, the story of how Travolta and the airline first got together has become all too familiar.

Travolta, an aviation geek, grew up collecting flight schedules in suburban New Jersey, developing in the process a particular fascination with Qantas, which flew the longest over-water routes in the world. In 2002, he approached then Qantas chief executive
Geoff Dixon
about a potential role.

There is little doubt Travolta is a true believer: by 2002 he already owned the plane in which he had flown himself to Santiago the weekend before, a 1964 Qantas 707 that had more recently belonged to
Frank Sinatra
and Las Vegas developer
Kirk Kerkorian
.

Nor has any of the recent bad publicity the airline has received given him a moment’s pause as its ambassador. “God no! Why would it?" he says. “Qantas’ worst day is any other airline’s best."

There is, however, more to the deal than meets the eye. While the sum he is paid is indeed nominal, Travolta says of the arrangement, “mostly it’s barter", like his long-standing promotional role with aviation-focused watchmaker Breitling, or the deal he signed with business jet manufacturer Bombardier last year.

Such deals “basically help me finance my aviation career by doing business with them", he says. And what those brand ambassadorial roles subsidise is effectively a mini-airline, comprising four planes, three pilots, three mechanics, five-star dining, on-board sleeping quarters and liveried flight attendants.

Indeed, judging by the snaps he happily produces on his mobile, Travolta modelled his house in the airline community he founded in Ocala, Florida, on the classic Pan Am terminals at JFK International Airport that also served as a model for the terminal in the HBO television series Pan Am. The house includes a 2400-metre runway that can carry a 747, views of aircraft from just about every room, and personnel that double as ground staff.

Travolta Air is perhaps the prime perk of an almost unprecedented tale of Hollywood survival, from the 1970s television hit Welcome Back Kotter to Saturday Night Fever – an Academy Award nomination on his first outing – and his most enduringly popular role, Danny Zuko in Grease. Then came the drought years of the 1980s and the extraordinary second flowering post-Pulp Fiction that has included the Mike Nichols classic Primary Colors, Michael and Face/Off.

But that career might have foundered at the start, when he was being compared to James Dean and Rudolph Valentino, but for two things, Travolta says. The first is “the very strong confidence" instilled in him by his actress-singer mother, football-player-turned-salesman father and his sisters.

“I was the baby of six kids, and they were all performers, so I was indulged," he says. “You couldn’t convince me that I didn’t have ability . . . in that sense I’m critic-proof."

The second is Scientology, to which he converted at 21. “As a young person, I don’t know how long I would have lasted without the stability that gave me," he says.

The same is true of the great tragedy of his life, his son Jett’s death from a seizure. “They never left my side for two years, because I had lost it," he says of the church. “They were diligent and uncompromising about how I was doing, and after two years of them really dealing with me every day, I finally began to come back to the living, and then a year after that I finally went back to work."

The movies that resulted – Oliver Stone’s much anticipated Savages alongside Del Toro,
Uma Thurman
and
Salma Hayek
, due for US release in July, and Killing Season, a two-hander with De Niro due out in December – will inevitably be seen as yet another comeback, Travolta knows, the career dynamic forever established after Pulp Fiction.

“I have always viewed my career much more as an athlete than an actor, only because I have always been treated more like a guy who wins the Superbowl and then suddenly doesn’t," he says. “The stakes are always created a little more dramatically for me than other actors."

He knows, too, the upside of that drama is that it has so seized the public imagination that he is by now pretty well beyond the vicissitudes of fashion. Indeed, as the careers of De Niro and
Meryl Streep
also attest, it’s a great time to be an established star in your 50s or 60s, for much the same reason that rock promoters fight over heritage acts such as AC/DC or the Eagles that bring with them big, welded-on audiences minted in the years before the business fell apart.

As in the music business, “I take my hat off to anyone who’s making a difference today because I don’t think it’s as easy as it was," Travolta says. “When I hit, I was alone; there was no one else to play with. It took five years before
Mel Gibson
and
Tom Cruise
and
Tom Hanks
arrived. Even Meryl Streep happened five years later. And then it took five years for them to get to where I was, so I was alone for 10 years."

These days there is not only a lot more competition between a lot more actors working at “a very similar level", but audiences are fragmented across innumerable competing platforms. “I don’t know that you could have a career like mine any more," he says. “I don’t say that out of any sense of braggadocio, but when I started you could create this level of stardom."

“They’re not really about the actors. When I was coming up, there were acting vehicles that catapulted you to a certain stardom. Saturday Night Fever was an actor’s vehicle, and Urban Cowboy. You were a character actor surviving in [big films]."

By now, Travolta has begun to enjoy himself, channelling his favourite actress, Streep, in one of his favourite recent films, The Iron Lady.

“I loved that line ‘what about thought’," he says. “I mean, what about thought? Everything is about how people feel, [rather than] sense or logic."

It’s a spooky, pitch-perfect evocation that reminds you that while it is tempting to think what he has been selling down the decades is a redemption tale – or the likeable, reliable persona clients such as Qantas obviously value – it is, in the final analysis, those impeccable acting chops that account for his survival.

When he sees the shock of recognition it elicits, he keeps right on, enjoying the enjoyment, unable to stop entertaining. But then, as he points out, Streep is a doddle for him. “She’s so specific," he says. “She puts a magnifying glass to behaviour, which is what I do. I probably identify more with Meryl than I do with any other actor."

Which is why acting with her remains one of his outstanding goals. Not that it would be easy to find a two-hander. “In Meryl’s movies the female character usually has much more to do, to behave, to be like than the male," he says. Still, “I have waited 30 years to act with De Niro and 25 to act with Meryl and she’s my next target".

“I’m happiest when I can bury myself," he says. “I like to be other people completely; it would bore me to play anything even close to myself."

So, as he’s brought the subject up, who is that person?

“Kind of conservative and kind of contented to some degree with what he’s achieved," Travolta says thoughtfully.

“And a good sense of humour," he says with that trademark grin. “I always like to have a good laugh at myself."